The night Bai Zixuan was born, the world forgot how to breathe.
In the Tianxuan Domain, a realm where stars stitched fate and divine order whispered through every stream of Qi, the silence was more terrifying than thunder. Even the wind dared not speak. The sacred bells at the Temple of Heavensong, which rang at the birth of every child to welcome their destiny, stood still as if the world itself held its breath.
Inside the Jade Sky Pavilion, twelve elders of the Heavenly Path Sect stood in a solemn circle around a crying infant wrapped in white silk. Between them floated the Sky Mirror a colossal, levitating disk of glass and stardust. Its purpose was divine and absolute: to reflect the fate of every soul born within the Domain.
It had never failed. Not once.
Until now.
The mirror shimmered faintly, then dimmed. No celestial threads unraveled from the child. No light, no glow. Just a cold, silent blankness.
A bead of sweat rolled down the Grand Diviner's brow. He raised his trembling hand. "Perhaps the artifact requires cleansing."
The moment the words left his lips, the Sky Mirror cracked.
Not a spiderweb fracture. No. It split down the center clean, precise, final. A jagged scar across the artifact that had ruled birthrights for over 10,000 years.
The room erupted into silence so heavy it bent the air.
The infant had stopped crying.
"He bears no mark of fate" one elder whispered, his voice hoarse with dread. "No karma. No predestined path. Not even rejection."
"He is not within Heaven's script."
In Tianxuan, ruled by celestial laws and karmic destiny, to be without fate was not merely an anomaly. It was blasphemy.
The infant's parents, Bai Renyuan and Mei Lin, stood frozen behind the elders. They were no ordinary couple they were peak core cultivators, proud members of the Jade Flame Sect, respected for their loyalty and spiritual purity.
Now, they were on their knees.
The Grand Elder of Tianxuan turned toward them. His expression was carved from jade, unshaken by pity or grief. His voice was a decree.
"You will cast him out, or you shall fall with him. No sect, no clan, no god shall harbor a Heavenless."
Mei Lin clutched her son closer, silent tears streaking her cheeks. Renyuan's shoulders shook, but his cultivation core the very light that once burned so fiercely dimmed with helplessness.
They were cultivators. But more than that, they were parents.
And so, they obeyed.
They left under moonless sky, cloaked in silence and grief.
They passed the Crystal Steps, where the stars bent low to bless the faithful. They walked beyond the Spirit Lakes, where fortune once danced in ripples of silver. Through abandoned temples and fields overgrown with the bones of forgotten cultivators.
Until they reached the edge of the Forbidden Spirit Forest a cursed place, where corrupted Qi festered and fate went to rot.
No one ventured past that point. Not even ghosts.
The trees there moved when unobserved. Their roots twitched like fingers in shallow graves. The sky above the forest was eternally overcast, a bruised violet hue that refused to shine. Every inch of land pulsed with Yin Qi, and the deeper one went, the more time unraveled like frayed silk.
This was the place where the Heavenless Child would be buried or so they thought.
Renyuan laid the boy at the roots of an ancient blackwood tree so large it split the mountain's edge. Its bark was cracked like dragon hide, and its trunk whispered prayers in tongues no longer remembered.
Mei Lin knelt beside her child, placing soft talismans beneath him each inked with runes of protection, silence, and suppression. Her hands trembled as she traced a final seal on his chest.
"He will hate us," she whispered.
"No," Renyuan said. "He will survive."
The wind moaned as if in mourning.
Without another word, they turned away.
And Zixuan watched them go not with tears, not with screams, but with wide, solemn eyes that held no trace of the divine.
The forest did not reject him.
It curled around him.
They expected the wilds to devour him.
But the Forbidden Spirit Forest, for all its madness and curse, did not kill the Heavenless Child. It sheltered him. Whispered to him. Fed him through the roots and air and Qi of corrupted beasts.
At first, he barely moved, just stared into the canopy above as it shifted and swayed like a living sky.
Then came the dreams.
They started as murmurs words spoken in ancient dialects that no living sect remembered. Then came visions: of tombs sealed in blood, of spirits crying beneath the soil, of gates once shut by gods.
He did not fear them. He listened.
One night, a spirit serpent as long as ten men slithered from the mist. Its eyes glowed red, its fangs hissed with venom that could dissolve bone. It reared to strike
And then bowed.
Its head pressed to the earth. Submission.
Zixuan reached out and placed a hand on its scales. The poison sizzled in the air but not toward him. It danced away.
At age six, he spoke the name of an ancient beast without ever learning it. At age seven, he found a sealed tomb its doors chained shut with jade links carved from cursed cultivator cores.
He did not break it open. He merely stood there and listened to it breathe.
At age ten, the boy was no longer human by ordinary measure.
His skin had turned pale like moon-glass. His black hair shimmered faintly with frost even when no wind blew. A long scar ran down his back twisting with black runes that pulsed with faint light. No one had carved them.
He had not wept once in ten years.
But the forest knew him. And it obeyed.
One morning, he stood at the edge of the forest. Barefoot, wrapped in the black silk cloth his mother once swaddled him in now stained with ash, time, and beast-blood.
He walked east.
For three days.
The sky changed color. The air thinned. The cursed Qi faded. And finally, a valley came into view.
Yinshade Valley.
A ruined sect.
The entrance gates were cracked, half-sunken into moss. Their banners once proud, now torn like old flags on a forgotten battlefield fluttered weakly in the breeze.
No one had passed here in years. Perhaps centuries.
He walked forward.
An old man with one eye, a crooked back, and rusted spiritual robes sat atop the gate's broken arch. He looked half-asleep until he saw the boy.
"You... from the forest?" he croaked.
Zixuan nodded.
The man squinted, spitting into the dirt. "No one survives that place."
Zixuan met his gaze. "I did."
The man stood slowly, spiritual pressure radiating just slightly, testing.
Zixuan didn't flinch.
"What's your name, boy?"
"Bai Zixuan."
The man froze.
He stared into the boy's eyes so calm, too calm. Then looked toward the sky.
"There is no fate in the heavens for that name."
Zixuan said nothing for a moment.
Then he lifted his gaze to the heavens, still gray and cold.
"Then I'll write one myself."
The man stared for a long while. Then sighed.
"You'll find no glory here," he said. "Yinshade Valley is forgotten. The only ones who remain are those too broken to leave."
"Perfect," Zixuan whispered.
The gates creaked.
And opened.
Thus began the legend of the Heavenless Child.
The boy born without destiny.
The one abandoned by light and cradled by shadow.
The one who would not kneel before the Sky,
But rise
And break it.